Completely focused on a chat interface, meetings, and video calls, Microsoft Teams Essentials is designed especially for small businesses.
The difference between this new version and Microsoft 365 Business Basic is mainly centred around the functionalities of Teams and cloud storage. Teams Essentials offers extended limits like longer meetings and more storage. Among its special functions, specially designed for small businesses, the following functions stand out:
- No time limit: you won’t have to worry about the time in your meetings anymore. This version has up to 30 hours, so time will no longer be a limit in both private and group meetings.
- More capacity: Teams Essentials offers the ability to bring up to 300 people together in the same virtual room.
- Calendar integration: you can use your existing calendar to control your meetings and times. This version will allow you to integrate your Outlook Calendar and soon also your Google Calendar.
- Easy invitations: the function of inviting people to your meetings is much simpler in this version. You can simply invite them by adding their email address. They will receive a link to join your meeting. Also, if participants don’t have Teams, they can open the meeting in their browser. No more installations or user creations will be necessary.
- More interactivity: virtual backgrounds, together mode, live closed captions, live reactions, and more. Everything you need to make your meetings much more interactive.
- Ongoing chat: chat conversations will continue even if the meeting is over.
- Small business group chats template: quickly start a group project and host meetings with anyone, assign tasks to teammates and create polls to receive feedback quickly all in one hub, taking productivity to the next level.
- Mobile chat: you can have access to all the content of your meetings and organize them by locations, photos, files, etc. The main objective of all these improvements is to facilitate the us of applications and simplify them into a single app that meets all the needs that small businesses need in their day-to-day.
When it comes to pricing Microsoft Teams Essentials could look appealing at just $4 per user per month, against the Zoom Pro license is $14.99 per month. Microsoft Teams Essentials is now available.
Would you like to try it? What functionality would you add to this version of Teams for Small Business?